Farmers Urge Defeat of Land Plans : Elections: Measures to preserve Ventura orchards from development are unfair to owners of property, group says.

Seeking to preserve its members’ property rights, the Ventura County Farm Bureau today is set to unveil a campaign to defeat two Ventura ballot measures that would protect thousands of acres of orchards around the city from urban sprawl.

“This is an issue we feel very strongly about,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the farm bureau, whose board of directors decided two months ago to oppose the twin farmland-preservation measures that will go to city voters Nov. 7.

In this rapidly developing city, the remaining collection of growers said they believe it would be unfair for them to have to obtain permission from voters to develop their land.

“It is a good idea to control growth,” said Ventura farmer Bob Tobias. “But this is just flat unfair to me.”

But supporters of the Save Our Agricultural Resources, or SOAR, initiatives say farmers are motivated by self-interest, guarding their rights to cash out to hungry developers.

“It’s just really out and out greed,” said Sheri Vincent, a Ventura resident and initiative supporter. “They just don’t want restrictions on what they want to do.”

On the November ballot, voters will decide Measure I and Measure J, both intended to preserve the agricultural buffers that surround the city and pockets of orchards inside city limits.

If either measure is approved, farmland in and around the city would be restricted from development for the next 35 years unless landowners received permission from the city’s voters.

Those land-use decisions traditionally have been reserved for the City Council.

A local citizens group qualified the first measure for the ballot early this summer. But since that initiative has not been tested in court, supporters qualified a second initiative modeled after a Northern California law that was upheld by the state Supreme Court earlier this year.

Farmers accuse suburbanites who support the measure of trying to preserve scenic views, not necessarily to protect working ranches.

“The concern is not over the preservation of agriculture, the concern is over the preservation of undeveloped land,” Laird said.

“I think there is a thought that we can have this five acres over here or this five acres over here and have it be romantic,” he said. “We are a business, we cannot be trivialized.”

But Ventura City Councilman Gary Tuttle said protecting agricultural land as open space is legitimate.

“There is nothing wrong in my opinion [with trying] to protect and preserve large groups of lemon trees to preserve the quality of life in the city,” Tuttle said.

Some farmers disagree.

Edwin Duval, a retired lawyer whose family has been farming 50 acres of lemons in east Ventura since World War II, said the initiatives would clog the system with unnecessary red tape.

“You are going to have a citywide election if someone wants to change a two-by-four” quipped the 77-year-old rancher. “It’s absurd.”

But supporters of the initiatives said city leaders have failed to protect agricultural land from development in the past, and see the initiatives as a way of protecting diminishing acreage from being gobbled up by development.

“It only takes four votes on a City Council to reverse decades of treatment for these areas,” said former Ventura City Councilman Todd Collart. “My sense is they are vulnerable at all times to the whims of council members.”

“The simple fact is,” Councilman Stephen Bennett said, “that farmers will make a great deal of money when they sell their land for development.”

Right now, Bennett said, a grower can sell an acre of land for between $20,000 and $40,000 for the purpose of farming. If the same farmer sold that acre to be developed for housing, Bennett said, he would earn as much as nine times that amount.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure how much a farmer could make,” he said. “The SOAR initiative will make it harder to have their land rezoned.”

But Tobias contends that the initiative is too harsh and goes too far in restricting growth. “It should be called SHACKLE,” he quipped. “Shackling our agricultural resources is what it really does.”

The potential impacts of the initiatives on the farming community have reverberated countywide, inciting the interest of the 1,800-member farm bureau. The organization will unveil the details of its plan to fight the measures at a press conference today.